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IT adoption in healthcare has grown at both process and enterprise level. The pharmaceutical vertical has been the first to take advantage of IT, and like any other industry, it started IT adoption at the department level, having department specific solution without integration. Then came the ERP era, and the pharmaceutical companies realized the need for integrated solutions to reduce duplication of work and use information across the enterprise. This helped enterprises to integrate departments like finance, procurement, manufacturing, sales, and HR. Today, the scenario has changed; healthcare organizations, particularly pharmaceuticals, are adopting IT solutions to automate the entire process of the organization.

Apart from pharmaceuticals, hospitals, diagnostics, laboratories, and pharmaceuticals R&D are considered the biggest spenders in IT. Pharmaceutical retail has also seen considerable amount of spending in IT to reach out to the customer.

Strategic deployment in IT has helped at all stages of the pharmaceutical value chain, starting from drug discovery, drug development, manufacturing, and distribution to sales and marketing. India is being considered the new destination for drug discovery and development because of our advantage of having talent, cost effectiveness, and availability of volunteers to conduct clinical trial studies. India has more number of FDA approved pharmaceutical manufacturing setups and, very shortly, will have more number of pharmaceutical R&D units. This trend has been a major contributor for Indian healthcare to adopt the best world practices in the entire spectrum of healthcare.

G Radhakrishna Pillai CIO, SRL Ranbaxy

IT is used to automate the entire data capture and extraction process from multiple source and systems. There are three components in e-enabling data management aspects in clinical trial processes. One is remote electronic data capture (e-CRF {case report form}+e-LAB). The second is Web-based data reporting and collection, and the third, data analysis.

Currently, some CROs have implemented the e-diary concept using PDA, which is replacing paper diaries used for clinical data capture at the investigating site. This has reduced the time for capturing information and cleaning the captured data.

Wireless information technology has helped save significant time in the healthcare sector.

RFID labeling on drugs has helped in better tracking and tracing of drugs as well as combating counterfeit drugs. Even though India is most vulnerable to counterfeit drugs, Indian companies have not yet started using the RFID tagging for domestic drug distribution. Indian pharmaceutical companies have been using RFID technology for some time to meet global requirements for shipping drugs to the international market.

Most businesses in the healthcare vertical are in service, and pharmaceutical is an exemption. In any service ecosystem all stakeholders involved are critical for the success of that business, so I strongly believe that vendors are partners in our business too.

Once we consider them partners, half the concerns of CIOs are taken care. Today, one needs to have a balance between business and technology and by that virtue, has to rub shoulders with other CXOs. A CIO is the change agent in any organization, and any change will not be successfully achieved without taking your peer CXO in confidence. So, people management and PR are some of the soft skills the CIO should have in this highly competitive business environment. A CIO should also be a visionary to anticipate future business needs, as both business and technology are very dynamic.

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